New York Quotes

1. "If only men were like New York taxi-cabs and had a light that they can switch on when they're interested and off when they're not available. Then you'd know exactly where you were and you wouldn't have to worry about getting it wrong and being horribly embarrassed. --- Lucy"
Author: Alexandra Potter

2. "New York may end up being no more than a scrim, a spectral film that is none other than our craving for romance—romance with life, with masonry, with memory, sometimes romance with nothing at all. This longing goes out to the city and from the city comes back to us. Call it narcissism. Or call it passion. It has its flare-ups, its cold nights, its sudden lurches, and its embraces. It is our life finally revealed to us in the most lifeless hard objects we'll ever cast eyes on: concrete, steel, stonework. Our need for intimacy and love is so powerful that we'll look for them and find them in asphalt and soot."
Author: André Aciman

3. "Lexington wasn't a great city, like Philadelphia or New York, but around the Courthouse square, and along Main Street and Broadway, brick buildings reared two and three stories tall, and it was possible to buy almost anything: breeze-soft silks from France that came upriver from New Orleans, fine wines and cigars, pearl necklaces, and canes with ivory handles shaped like parrots or dogs'-heads or (in the case of Mary's older friend Cash Clay) scantily dressed ladies (but Cash was careful not to carry that one in company)."
Author: Barbara Hambly

4. "As N.Y.C. Public Advocate, I released a report that showed that stop-and-frisks of African Americans in 2012 were barely half as likely to yield a weapon as those of white New Yorkers - and a third less likely to yield contraband. Despite this evidence, the vast majority of those stopped are young black and Latino men."
Author: Bill De Blasio

5. "I think if you thought about it a little while longer, you'd realize that you'd far better be a Ghostbuster: a nerd in New York with an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on your back, and a one-in-four chance of being Bill Murray."
Author: Caitlin Moran

6. "Said Father Nash "was a most wonderful man in prayer, one of the most earnest, devout, spiritually-minded, heavenly-minded men I ever saw. . . . He labored about in many places in central and northern New York, and gave himself up to almost constant prayer, literally praying himself to death at last. I have been informed that he was found dead in his room in the attitude of prayer."
Author: Charles Grandison Finney

7. "Forgive me if I'm wrong. But are you-were you-did you come here on a train from New York about ten years ago?"
Author: Christina Baker Kline

8. "Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. "All the News That's Fit to Print," it says. It's been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there. Then I check to make sure that it still irritates me. If I can still exclaim, under my breath, why do they insult me and what do they take me for and what the hell is it supposed to mean unless it's as obviously complacent and conceited and censorious as it seems to be, then at least I know I still have a pulse. You may wish to choose a more rigorous mental workout but I credit this daily infusion of annoyance with extending my lifespan."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

9. "One might come up with other and kinder distinctions (I shall not be doing so) but the plain fact about the senator from New York is surely that she is a known quantity who has already been in the White House purely as the result of a relationship with a man, and not at all a quixotic outsider who represents the aspirations of an 'out' group, let alone a whole sex or gender."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

10. "I actually don't trust anyone who tells me they don't like New York."
Author: Clemence Poesy

11. "I'm quietly becoming New York's premiere actor. People don't understand. They have me pigeon-holed as a comedian."
Author: Colin Quinn

12. "Being a lawyer in New York sucks because you're working eighty, sometimes a hundred hours a week."
Author: David Steinberg

13. "We all have heard it claimed that 13 is an 'unlucky number.' Indeed, there are many hotels in America that for this very reason claim not to have a 13th floor, in the sense that there is no button bearing the label '13' in their elevators (I recently stayed in one in New York, in fact)."
Author: Douglas Hofstadter

14. "I've been known to write on the Underground in London and on the subway in New York. I have two or three cafes in Paris that I go into. I find a corner with a little shade, and I can work."
Author: Douglas Kennedy

15. "I took a plane from New York City to Los Angeles for an audition. I met all the people. After that, I was told to have another audition, but I didn't want to go there again."
Author: Ed O'Neill

16. "New York is like the weirdest city in the United States, in a great way, and Los Angeles is probably more similar to most of America."
Author: Ellie Kemper

17. "But I try not to become preoccupied with that because with whatever direction I follow, with whatever advice I've followed or not followed, It's landed me in New York, in a very beautiful hotel, talking to people about something that I love. So I ain't that far off."
Author: Eriq La Salle

18. "I went to New York and Miami and hung out by the beach, and I love the American boys, so I wrote a song about it."
Author: Estelle Fanta Swaray

19. "I came to New York in 1986. My father didn't think it was a good idea. I didn't know how I found it, but I went to Hunter College. I had no money and I couldn't speak English."
Author: Francisco Costa

20. "During many a single week, I daresay, more money is spent in New York upon useless and evil things than would suffice to run the kingdom of Denmark for a year."
Author: H.L. Mencken

21. "I had traveled eight thousand miles around the American continent and I was back on Times Square; and right in the middle of a rush hour, too, seeing with my innocent road-eyes the absolute madness and fantastic hoorair of New York with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves, the mad dream-grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying, just so they could be buried in those awful cemetery cities beyond Long Island City."
Author: Jack Kerouac

22. "Pater noster Our Father who art in heaven Stay there And we'll stay here on earth Which is sometimes so pretty With its mysteries of New York And its mysteries of Paris At least as good as that of the Trinity With its little canal at Ourcq Its great wall of China Its river at Morlaix Its candy canes With its Pacific Ocean And its two basins in the Tuileries With its good children and bad people With all the wonders of the world Which are here Simply on the earth Offered to everyone Strewn about Wondering at the wonder of themselves And daring not avow it As a naked pretty girl dares not show herself With the world's outrageous misfortunes Which are legion With legionaries With torturers With the masters of this world The masters with their priests their traitors and their troops With the seasons With the years With the pretty girls and with the old bastards With the straw of misery rotting in the steel of cannons."
Author: Jacques Prévert

23. "But one sets of grandparents lived on Davidson Avenue in the Bronx and one lived in Manhattan and I had an aunt and uncle in Queens, so in my heart I was a New Yorker."
Author: Jason Alexander

24. "It is the fashion in many parts of the United States to sneer at Chicago. This is notably the case in San Francisco. Most San Franciscans say they dislike Chicago.It is true that there is much that is unlovely there. To the impatient traveler hastening from New York to San Francisco the enforced stop at Chicago is distasteful. For Chicago has contrived things with such skill that it is difficult to cross the continent without stopping within her gates. Everybody must pay toll. The pilgrim must pause, even thought he do not unpack his wallet. He must stop at least for a bath and a bite. You find it difficult to go around Chicago. Chicago will not let you pass her without stopping."
Author: Jerome Hart

25. "I think the choice of actors that we have is a little more varied and rich here in New York than in L.A."
Author: Jerry Orbach

26. "In New York I was always so scared of saying that I wrote fiction. It just seemed like, 'Who am I to dare to do that thing here? The epicenter of publishing and writers?' I found all that very intimidating and avoided writing as a response."
Author: Jhumpa Lahiri

27. "I always figured Metropolis was north of New York, actually. Between New York and Boston, in my mind."
Author: Jim Lee

28. "Every life has a soundtrack.There is a tune that makes me think of the summer I spent rubbing baby oil on my stomach in pursuit of the perfect tan. There's another that reminds me of tagging along with my father on Sunday morning to pick up the New York Times. There's the song that reminds me of using fake ID to get into a nightclub; and the one that brings back my cousin Isobel's sweet sixteen, where I played Seven Minutes in Heaven with a boy whose breath smelled like tomato soup. If you ask me, music is the language of memory."
Author: Jodi Picoult

29. "Unfortunately I was in New York when 9/11 happened."
Author: Joe Cocker

30. "I was born here in the city, born in the Bronx. Son of a cop. One grandfather was a taxi driver; the other was a firefighter. New York is in my DNA."
Author: Joe Lhota

31. "New York is at once cosmopolitan and parochial, a compendium of sentimental certainties. It is in fact the most sentimental of the world's great cities - in its self-congratulation a kind of San Francisco of the East"
Author: John Gregory Dunne

32. "Acquiring an aggressive, honest, and communicative agent with actual relationships in real-live New York publishing houses is, in my opinion, the single most important move that a writer who aspires to be successful can make."
Author: John Lescroart

33. "I mean, if you have to wake up in the morning to be validated by the editorial page of the New York Times, you got a pretty sorry existence."
Author: Karl Rove

34. "When I was five and Sarah seven, my mother went on a trip. She was gone from our home in Rochester, New York, for several days. But she was often gone — not always from the house but missing from our lives nonetheless. Then one day Sarah and I returned from school to find her standing at the door, a piñata in her hand, smiling her spellbinding, I-am-overjoyed-at-the-sight-of-you smile. Now when I imagine that scene, my mind's eye puts a sombrero on her head, but I doubt she was wearing one. She had just come home from a trip to Juarez, Mexico, where she had obtained a quickie divorce. She told us she was taking us to live in Florida. We had no idea where – or what – Florida was. "There will be oranges there," she said. "They're everywhere. You can reach up and pull them off the trees."
Author: Katie Hafner

35. "The people who say New York never sleeps must have never visited Las Vegas."
Author: Michelle Madow

36. "I actually met Chick Corea in New York, where I was staying with a bass player friend."
Author: Miroslav Vitous

37. "I like a New York accent."
Author: Mollie King

38. "I ordered another. If this was going to be a fish-story, I needed stimulants."On the liner going to New York I met a girl." Biffy made a sort of curious gulping noise not unlike a bulldog trying to swallow half a cutlet in a hurry so as to be ready for the other half. "Bertie, old man, I can't describe her. I simply can't describe her."This was all to the good."
Author: P.G. Wodehouse

39. "I left for New York expecting to repeat my success, only to be turned down by almost every publisher in that city, till the Viking Press, my American publishers of a lifetime, thought of taking me on."
Author: Patrick White

40. "On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere. New York was the nowhere he had built around himself, and he realized that he has no intention of ever leaving it again."
Author: Paul Auster

41. "Tangier is more New York than New York. ... Then you must see how alike the two places are. The life revolves wholly about the making of money. Practically everyone is dishonest. In New York you have Wall Street, here you have the Bourse. ... In New York you have the slick financiers, here the money changers. In New York you have your racketeers. Here you have your smugglers. And you have every nationality and no civic pride."
Author: Paul Bowles

42. "New York grew up before the automobile. And even though it's full of cars, its shape and form didn't get created around the automobile."
Author: Paul Goldberger

43. "I'm an east coaster, you know, I'm brought up in Toronto where it's very much, like, kind of a miniature New York in that there's a subway and you're surrounded by people a lot and, you know, you bump into people and you have interactions and you communicate and la la la."
Author: Paulo Costanzo

44. "Soon after Harris's HeLa-chicken study, a pair of researchers at New York University discovered that human-mouse hybrids lost their human chromosomes over time, leaving only the mouse chromosomes. This allowed scientists to begin mapping human genes to specific chromosomes by tracking the order in which genetic traits vanished. If a chromosome disappeared and production of a certain enzyme stopped, researchers knew the gene for that enzyme must be on the most recently vanished chromosome. Scientists in laboratories throughout North America and Europe began fusing cells and using them to map genetic traits to specific chromosomes, creating a precursor to the human genome map we have today."
Author: Rebecca Skloot

45. "My model, such as it is, is a mentorship model, which is to say that I care personally, and I involve myself personally/emotionally with the work of each student, and I try to make it such that they want to reach for more, do better, risk more, try new things, abandon limited objectives, individuate, and so on. For me it is personal, to the best of my ability, and it is about making more of the writer and of the writer's task in each case. I also think it's possible to do this, to teach in this way, in a classroom free of rancor and backbiting and competitive jostling. So: my class should be a place of peace, a place where anything is possible, where the code of realism is in disrepute, and the worst thing you can say, the absolutely verboten thing, is the phrase: The New Yorker."
Author: Rick Moody

46. "My education in the public schools of New York City between 1932 and 1944 was an excellent preparation for a life in science. Because of the Depression, these schools were able to attract a remarkably talented and dedicated collection of teachers who encouraged their students to strive for the highest levels of accomplishment."
Author: Robert Fogel

47. "I also got a chance to go to the American Museum in New York, which helped my interest."
Author: Robert T. Bakker

48. "I'm from New York, so I'm a big Howard Stern fan."
Author: Stephen Root

49. "Back in the "leather and lace" eighties, I was the fantasy editor for a publishing company in New York City. It was a great time to be young and footloose on the streets of Manhattan—punk rock and folk music were everywhere; Blondie, the Eurythmics, Cyndi Lauper, and Prince were all strutting their stuff on the newly created MTV; and the eighties' sense of style meant I could wear my scruffy black leather into the office without turning too many heads. The fantasy field was growing by leaps and bounds, and I was right in the middle of it, working with authors I'd worshiped as a teen, and finding new ones to encourage and publish."
Author: Terri Windling

50. "One time I listened to Farmer give a talk on HIV to a class at the Harvard School of Public Health, and in the midst of reciting data, he mentioned the Haitian phrase "looking for life, destroying life," Then he explained, "It's an expression Haitians use if a poor woman selling mangoes falls off a truck and dies." I felt as if for that moment I could see a little way into his mind, It seemed like a place of hyperconnectivity, At moments like that, I thought that what he wanted was to erase both time and geography, connecting all parts of his life and tying them instrumentally to a world in which he saw intimate, inescapable connections between the gleaming corporate offices of Paris and New York and a legless man lying on the mud floor of a hut in the remotest part of remote Haiti. Of all the world's errors, he seemed to feel, the most fundamental was the "erasing" of people, the "hiding away" of suffering. "My big struggle is how people can not care, erase, not remember."
Author: Tracy Kidder

New York Quotes Pictures